106: Reducing Burnout in Healthcare Workers with Dr. Bryan Sexton

Dr. Bryan Sexton has captured the wisdom of frontline caregivers through rigorous assessments of safety culture, teamwork, and workforce resilience. His research instruments have been used around the world in over 3000 hospitals, in 30 countries. His current R01 grant from NIH is a randomized clinical trial of resilience training.

With specializations in organizational assessment, teamwork, survey development, and quantitative methods, Bryan spends his time teaching, mentoring, conducting research, and finding practical ways of getting busy caregivers to do the right thing, by making it the easy thing to do.

Bryan has found that results across industries, work settings, shifts, professions, and countries highlight a great deal about reliability in high risk environments – specifically, “you are better off changing the situation, than trying to change human nature.”

He starts off by telling us how he got started studying burnout in healthcare workers, (BTW- he does an amazing southern accent), he defines the three types burnout and tools he uses to in his resilience research.

Bryan wants people to know that burnout is recoverable.

If you work in a healthcare setting or with healthcare workers, I highly recommend you ask your employees to enroll in Dr. Sexton’s WISER study. You can send your employees to bit.ly/3wiser to participate.

Biggest Takeaways You Don’t Want to Miss:

The three types of burnout are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment.

The type of burnout that resonates with him and the healthcare workers he encounters is emotional exhaustion.

Burnout is the diminished ability to experience the restorative effects of positive emotions.

In the past 5 to 7 years, the data on burnout in healthcare has come to light, so hospital administrators are paying more attention.

Take a look at what you are doing that’s designed to be helpful for your workforce and ask yourself “do I have (baked into this resource) the opportunity for people to pause and reflect on what they’re doing well?”.

At the Duke Patient Safety Center, the wellness activities they participate in have to be evidence based, participants can feel benefits quickly and have a low barrier to entry.

Mentioned in this episode:

Full Bio:

Dr. Sexton has captured the wisdom of frontline caregivers through rigorous assessments of safety culture, teamwork, and workforce resilience. His research instruments have been used around the world in over 3000 hospitals, in 30 countries. His current R01 grant from NIH is a randomized clinical trial of resilience training. He has studied teamwork, safety and resilience in high risk environments such as the commercial aviation cockpit, the operating room, and the intensive care unit, under funding from NIH, NASA, AHRQ, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation.

With specializations in organizational assessment, teamwork, survey development, and quantitative methods, he spends his time teaching, mentoring, conducting research, and finding practical ways of getting busy caregivers to do the right thing, by making it the easy thing to do. He has found that results across industries, work settings, shifts, professions, and countries highlight a great deal about reliability in high risk environments – specifically, “you are better off changing the situation, than trying to change human nature.”